Guest Post: A Bracing Rebuttal to ‘Leaders Who Dare Not Speak, Dare Not Lead’

My friendship with David Murray is almost as old as our respective adult daughters. It spans my entire career as a speechwriter and most of his second (or third) act in life, as PSA head and exec comms guru. I’ve trusted him with personal secrets under penalty of death and haven’t had to kill him yet. 

So it’s with some reluctance that I take public issue with his September 10th post, Institutional Leaders Who Dare Not Speak, Dare Not Lead. 

Who in their right minds (I ask with love) would argue, in the era of Elon Musk, Bill Ackman and former President Felonious Babyman, that what the world needs now is to hear more from our leaders?

Who, indeed, but an executive communicator. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But I think we might need to use a different set of tools. It’s kind of David to grant me this space to explain why. 

Early on in his piece, David writes, “During the… years since we stopped believing precisely that ’what was good for General Motors was good for America,’ it has seemed to me that most American institutions have inched toward humanity in their communications, from advertising to speeches.“ 

”Humanity” of communications sounds like a good thing to have. But what does it mean, especially in a corporate context? Please tell me it’s not about corporate personhood or Citizens United. Rather, he envisions leaders as souls of organizations. Ghosts in the machine. He notes, appreciatively, that in the 633 speeches Lee Iacocca gave while Chrysler CEO, Iacocca “felt it was his job to inspire people and that anything else on his daily calendar was mere ‘body and fender work.’”

Around the same time that Iacocca was in charge at Chrysler, I spent a few long weeks working on the shop floor at the Ford plant in Cicero, IL. Suspended over the assembly line was a crawler that continually ran the phrase (as best I can remember): “In the race for quality there is no finish line.”

Heaven preserve us from all this inspiration.

I certainly want our leaders to be human enough not to do things that will destroy humanity. But that’s about the extent to which I want to have to think about them at all. I want them to give me a decent job with fair pay and no forever chemicals in my drinking water and then leave me alone. I want them to do those same good things for other people, too. If we discover someday that robots can deliver on those wishes better than human CEOs can, I’m going to turn pro-robot-CEO without a moment of regret. 

David’s piece is largely based on two key arguments. I politely object to the first and simply reject the premise of the second.

First is this: “To the extent that a leader won’t claim the rhetorical freedom to express any conviction more personal and than [sic] what they can vouch that the whole institution believes—well, it’s a loss for the culture.”

Is it, though? “Rhetorical freedom” is a neat phrase, but it glosses over the untidy fact that CEOs, university and college presidents, finance bros, pundits and other bigwigs already run our politics, businesses and culture. Their views direct our economy and set our laws, shape our ways of life and define our terms of employment. Isn’t that quite enough “rhetorical freedom” for one day? Do we also need to absorb over our morning coffee the sharpish opinions of the CEO of Uncle Ed’s 10 Minute Oil Change on the issues of the day? “Thought leadership” is too often less about the former and more about the latter: Ayn Rand Objectivism with its own X account. The apotheosis of that ideal is My Pillow Guy. “Nuff said.

But while I object to the idea that we’d benefit from leaders’ increased rhetorical output, I reject the argument that leaders’ silence “renders executive communication a logistical function, rather than the rigorous intellectual and social discipline its best practitioners know it can be.” 

David has done as much as anyone in our profession to try and make our work more reflective, ethical and humane. Through his service to us as communicators, he has influenced, for the better, the thinking of an impressive array of leaders. But the optimism that launches him out of bed every day maybe obscures his view of the sodden reality of the profession broadly. It’s just not that smart. Maybe this explains why he yearns for us to have “the rigorous intellectual and social discipline its best practitioners know it can be,” because in real life a rigorous intellectual and social discipline it usually ain’t.

Our best colleagues in the field are smart, conscientious people. They not only understand at a leadership level every aspect of the organizations that employ them, but they combine that knowledge with a grasp of rhetoric and persuasion; a fluency in PR and media; a gift for storytelling; a fine hand for prose and a love for human thought in its jumbled glory, from Aeschylus or Toni Morrison to 1940s employee handbooks and dog-eared ”jokes for salesmen” pamphlets.

The problem isn’t the people, though. It’s the work. Executive communications rarely entails deep conversations with our principals about the future of democracy and how Olive Garden or Sequoia Capital can make a positive difference in the world. More often it’s: “We need to do a thing. Make it sound like a smartthing.” Or else: “How can I get more earned media without taking my pants off in public?”

I’d propose a different way of framing the challenge. In the Fall of 2023, shortly after the October 7 attack, and amidst the first wave of Israeli reprisals, my boss at Williams College, President Maud Mandel, sent out what we half-jokingly labeled The Unstatement: a reasoned explanation of her decision to exercise principled restraint in regards to issuing institutional statements. 

A statement on why we weren’t going to issue statements. It says a lot about the nature of exec comms that this is where we’re at.

In her message, Maud wrote, in part, “when the subject is national and world events I do not believe it is right, or even possible, for me to speak on behalf of the thousands of people who together constitute Williams.” I happen to agree with her view that leaders shouldn’t have (or presume) the authority to express viewpoints on behalf of their often-vast constituencies in any but a carefully limited set of circumstances.

Maud’s message had to do with statements specifically, whereas we’re thinking about leadership communications more broadly. Beyond the question of who speaks for whom is the question of who speaks at all. In his post, David highlights the recent Times op-ed and NPR interview by Wesleyan University President Michael Roth, which he holds up as models of engaged leadership. It’s a nice example, but maybe not one that we can extrapolate: Roth is the rare leader who matches his frequent public statements with a commitment to making sure others in his organization can also speak. Far more commonly, when a leader speaks up, they also speak over everyone else. 

It happens all the time: Someone gets a little loud at a party, and the rest of the crowd unconsciously lowers their voices. 

The world I want to see is a little different than the one David Murray describes. It’s one that esteems leaders’ views a little less and everyone else’s a little more. I heartily agree with him that it can sometimes be valuable to hear perspectives from the C-suite, especially when they relate to the principal’s area of expertise or responsibility. And in those instances the quality of our executive communications work matters greatly.

But I’m considerably less interested in leaders’ extramural observations than he is. The fact that you’re good at running a business or nonprofit doesn’t qualify you to tell us how to run a national economy or stop a war or build a bridge I’ll have to drive my family over. 

Even with the trend away from public statements, we still get more than our share of leaders’ “insights.” If the captains of industry could refrain from monopolizing public discourse for a little while, it might be nice for a change to hear from the deckhands and swabs, the administrative assistants and Uber drivers and warehouse pickers. 

If, instead of talking, we could get our leaders to spend time listening, I think people would have a lot to tell them. And if we’re lucky, they’ll be enlightened by what they hear at least as much as we profit by hearing them.

***

Jim’s and my intellectual and personal relationship is just as close as he describes and my respect for his mind is such that I’m truly flattered he took the time to write this. I have many reactions, but mainly, I feel: In strongly contradicting my piece, it seems to me that Jim actually completes it. Much of this, as my writer father said a reader once told him, “Is what I’d-a said if I could-a laid tongue to it.” Not instead of what I wrote, but in addition.

I think our thinking most closely converges in his conclusion: “If the captains of industry could refrain from monopolizing public discourse for a little while, it might be nice for a change to hear from the deckhands and swabs, the administrative assistants and Uber drivers and warehouse pickers. If, instead of talking, we could get our leaders to spend time listening, I think people would have a lot to tell them. And if we’re lucky, they’ll be enlightened by what they hear at least as much as we profit by hearing them.”

I have often said that I wish I could unilaterally rename “executive communications” “leadership communications.” Which would give practitioners the freedom to find and support thoughtful, influential people from all corners of an organization and all kinds of its stakeholders, to express ideas and opinions about everything related to the enterprise. And in their current roles, even more narrowly defined as “executive communications,” these practitioners can help their leaders lead by listening. And many of them are, through various in-person gatherings and social-media platforms.

I tell leaders, “Leadership communication isn’t just you, talking.” To the extent that leaders agree with that, or even overemphasize it lately, exec comms folks had better get about finding other ways to help them communicate, and connect.

But enough: I’ve had my say and Jim’s had his. And now, I think, we’d both benefit from having yours. —DM